If you listen to some of the biggest “gurus” today, you’ll hear the common refrain, “Just take massive action.” While there is some merit to that, it’s often bad advice because we have to take the right action.

Simply doing something for the sake of doing something can be a tremendous waste of time, energy, and money if you’re going down the wrong path, you can’t reach a goal if you don’t even know what it is. So, it’s critical to understand exactly what your end goal is. That’s where the old saying, “If you want better answers, ask better questions,” comes from. When you ask the right questions, you’ll come up with better answers that will propel you to your goals more quickly and effectively.

Think about it like this — you might ask yourself, “Why can’t I save any money?” While this may seem a decent question on the surface, its framing will lead to a lot of negative answers that essentially act as a disempowering affirmation, thereby fostering a poor mindset. A better question would be, “How can I save money?” This will lead to more positive answers, so the framing of the questions is critical.

There are countless tactical-level questions like this that you can ask yourself to help you make better financial decisions, but you need to first answer three strategic-level questions that will steer all of the other financial decisions you make.

“What is my personal mission?”

This question is foundational to your financial success, and its answer can act as your proverbial “North Star” to keep you on track. It’s such a powerful question because it gets to the core of why you do what you do, which helps you to better identify the right and wrong financial decisions.

When you can clearly articulate your personal mission, you’ll be able to quickly decide if a particular financial decision is right for you. This is an important distinction because when it comes to finances, you’ll often encounter scenarios where a particular decision is great for one person but terrible for another.

It’s pretty simple, in my opinion. Any financial decision you could possibly make will fit into one of two categories — one that helps you in pursuit of your mission, or one that hinders you. You need to aggressively avoid any decisions that don’t directly contribute to your mission.

I also want to stress the importance of defining your mission in a way that is very specific and simple for anyone to understand. The more clearly you can explain your mission to others, the better you truly understand it, which means you’ll be able to use it to filter your financial decisions more effectively.

“Why am I making this financial decision?”

I always tell my clients to be curious about their decisions because once you start to deeply analyze them, you’ll begin to develop a better understanding of why you make the kind of decisions you do. More importantly, you’ll begin to see patterns which then leads to you making better decisions.

So go deep. I typically say to go at least seven layers deep.

For example, yes, of course you want to make more money, but why?

Your first answer might be so you can support your family. That’s admirable, but is it the real answer? Probably not.

I find that when working with clients, they often start with these surface level answers, but once we start digging deeper and peel the layers of the onion back, we find the real answer, several layers in. So while their first answer might indeed be that they want to make more money to support their family, digging deeper may reveal that they grew up poor and watched their parents suffer the consequences of poor financial decisions.

Maybe they bounced from home to home, were hounded by bill collectors, and couldn’t afford basic necessities. They might then think that the real answer is they don’t want their family to suffer the way they did, and while this is true, we still probably haven’t arrived at the real answer yet.

Case in point — I went through this exact conversation with a client, and after some digging, we found that their financial decisions were an attempt to avoid embarrassment. You see, this particular client endured a lot of bullying because his family was poor, and in an attempt to avoid that now, often spent frivolously to appear more wealthy than he really was. That hurt him financially for years.

Once we uncovered that nugget of information, the genie was out of the bottle. Now, he’s equipped with that knowledge, and anytime he wants to spend money, he can quickly determine if it’s driven by the right reasons, or the unfortunate childhood programming he received by getting bullied for being poor.

I should probably also point out that we make decisions based on our own childhood programming, which causes us to feel unworthy. The first step in resolving this is to identify it, which you can do with my free Self-Love Quiz. The next step is to work with someone to undo it.

The key is to identify the root motivation for a decision. You want to make sure, first, that it aligns with your mission. Then, you also need to ensure that it is coming from a positive place because financial decisions made out of fear, anger, jealousy, or other negative motivations can still bring you down, even if they are aligned with your mission.

For example, before I took this approach, I lost over 10 million dollars between a few deals because I was so focused on proving that I could turn a terrible deal around that I should have walked away from. I was so wrapped up in what people would think of me if I did, that I became emotionally unable (or to be more accurate — unwilling) to walk away.

“How does the risk compare to the return”

Once you’re certain your decisions are aligned with your mission and are being driven by the proper motivation, it’s time to get into the technical side of things. It’s worth noting that this is where most people start because they don’t possess the knowledge you do, so they’re starting at a disadvantage to you.

You’ll first want to evaluate the potential risk and reward of a decision. In general, you’re looking for opportunities where the probability of the reward far outweighs the likelihood and impact of its risk. During times of economic uncertainty, like we’re facing today, you’ll want to prioritize the stability of an opportunity over its potential returns.

And it’s important to remember that most opportunities are overhyped. This shouldn’t surprise anyone, after all, if you were selling something, would you downplay the potential upside? Of course not. So caveat emptor applies here. In other words, trust but verify. Analyze every opportunity with a healthy level of skepticism and try to find reasons not to get involved.

I’ve found that when you actively look for reasons an opportunity isn’t a fit for you, the more likely you’ll be to uncover problems others would miss and avoid them. This helps to ensure that you only invest in the opportunities that are ideal for you and your mission.

The idea here is to go beyond the basics and start looking at all the tangents that could affect an opportunity. Try to identify all of the ways an opportunity could go sideways, including factors like climbing interest rates, new legislation, or supply chain issues, which could destroy the viability of an otherwise great investment opportunity.

I want to point out that this still won’t eliminate all risk. That’s simply not possible. But it will help you to spot risks that others would never even consider.

Better questions = better answers, which helps you make better decisions

By asking better questions and then digging deep below the surface for answers, you’ll be more equipped to make better financial decisions. This approach leverages both the financial and psychological aspects of decision making, and that gives you a distinct advantage in your financial decisions.

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Brad Chandler is founder of Brad Chandler Coaching. During a conversation with a transformation coach, Brad was told that he had a tick when talking about his childhood that was likely the result of unresolved childhood trauma, and that it was likely negatively impacting every area of his life. After receiving help for that, his life was completely transformed, leading him to new levels of happiness, peace, calm, and success he had only dreamt of previously, which inspired him to launch a coaching business, Brad Chandler Coaching, to help others achieve a similar outcome in their own lives.